Thank You, Come Again
by Kshar
Summary: 'As You Were' vignette. "You'd think people wouldn't be so repetitive when they're talking to themselves, but there you have it."


Thank You, Come Again  
by Kshar

Spoilers: S6, 'As You Were'.

Disclaimer: Characters are the property of Fox, and were created by Joss Whedon.

It starts in your toes, and you curl them, down toward the soles of your feet (fists of toes) until the skin on the top of your feet aches. You fight against the feeling for a while, realizing as you do that this is an odd situation you hadn't counted on dealing with in your odd life: your toes are angry. Go figure. Next your ankles go out in sympathy. They do not want to move. They're in a bad mood and they don't want to play. Next it works its way up your legs, past your knees, up and up and up until your whole body is saturated. The hair on the back of your hands is annoyed. Every organ in your body soaks up this kind of itchy frustration that makes you want to scream.

Great.

You've been holding yourself up all day, and your spine's starting to feel like a steel rod. A tired steel rod. With tired muscles and tired skin hanging off it.

You want to go home. You've been wanting to go home for the last few hours of this shift. 'I want to go home,' you keep thinking to yourself. You'd think people wouldn't be so repetitive when they're talking to themselves, but there you have it. You scrape grease off a grill like you were born to it.

You can feel the warmth that remains in the metal radiating up to the tips of your fingers. And the grease spotting your arms, and that's nearly impossible to scrub off. You didn't realize that when you took this on: how hard it would be to scrub your skin clean. Your hands always feel greasy. You're getting old lady hands from washing all the time.

This shift. It's either this shift or the next one or the last one. Days seem to run together, until they're one smooth, seamless...uh, day. Your time is all about other people's lunchbreaks or snackbreaks or coffee and pie (now with extra cat). It's easier than you thought: doing what you're told. Filling in the gaps. Moving as little as you can. Smiling at people almost as though you're happy to see them. Thank you, come again.

Finally you finish, and you walk home in what is probably a pretty evening. The breeze is mild and cool on your face, when you notice. You go through some unpleasantness with a vamp and then a different kind of unpleasantness with another vamp (you notice that the stars look dull tonight, as though they're muffled), and finally there's not a part of your body that isn't tired and achy. Even your pancreas is hurting. Probably. You're not entirely sure where it is, but you're pretty sure it hurts. One half of your ass feels warm, like you were lying on something squishy. That's even less appealing than it sounds.

'I want to go home,' you thought at kind of a vital moment (forty thousand dull stars and not a sound). Which is odd, because the small beauty that you've found in this is that you don't think; that you don't have to think. Thinking is not something that has worked out positively for your people. Your people being you.

Thank you, come again.

You rearrange your clothes so as not to scandalize the neighbors (although it's not like anyone ever looks out their windows in Sunnydale) or hang a big neon 'A' over your head. Because you're worried about worrying people. When you move, you can smell l'eau d'Doublemeat. You swear it soaks into your pores, if not right down to the bone. Sometimes, when you think you've washed it all away, you can still smell it in your hair or you find something sticky in it. Ew. Reason enough to hack your own hair off at shoulder level with a pair of blunt scissors in the middle of the night. Or, you know, make an appointment at Jose's Sunnydale Curl Up 'N Dye. Whichever.

Salty fries and slightly squished greasy burger. You've prepared a banquet, and you made it with your own hands (returning to the nest proud with the kill, the scent of blood still on your breath. Baby birds can eat the equivalent of their own bodyweight in a day). It's good enough to keep someone alive for another day. Although it smells a little-wrong-and sweet. Not so much like food.

The smell's been clinging more lately. At first you thought it might be the reek of death. Then you realized death smelled a whole lot like the Doublemeat Palace.

Do I stink of death, lover? you wonder. Like he'd notice anyway. (Like you would.)

So, you remove the evidence from your coat. Or try to. The basement is stone-cool and scented like those dryer sheets, which is nice. You flip radio stations so many times your fingers start to revolt, and keep bringing you back to the country station, where you have to listen to Clovis Jo Willard sing about how her man got run over, her truck ran off and how she ran her dog into an old oak tree on the way home from her day shift at Hooters. Well, maybe you've got more in common with old Clovis Jo than you thought. She finishes up and you flip again. You wind up with some guy who doesn't sound a day over seventy, reminiscing warmly about a song he knew from long ago. He stops talking (almost sounding like he was sad, almost like he was missing the fuzzy little scrap of security blanket his oldest son used to carry around and chew on with loose, unformed little milk teeth forty years ago, how time flies). The music starts. You've heard this song before.

You turn the radio off.

You didn't want to go anywhere. You don't. There isn't anywhere to go. And you're sick of moving. You just want to be still. Your world's getting smaller every day, closing in on you. Soon it will wrap itself around you, like a coat (like a little scrap of coat). You find that comforting.

You start to think it again: 'I want to go home', and then you stop yourself. You are home.

You're getting old, or you're fading away, or both. You never used to get tired this early. You'll just sit down for a minute, and cover yourself with your battle-scarred coat, and close your eyes. You give yourself a little pep talk. Let's win this one for the Buffster, you tell yourself. Another triumphant day!, you tell yourself, and you add a mental exclamation mark to make it seem less like you're being sarcastic. Sweetheart, you tell yourself-you always call yourself sweetheart, to yourself (no-one else does anymore)-things will be okay.

For the record, is it weirder to talk to yourself, or to be calling yourself a liar?

But still, things will be okay. It wasn't such a bad day. Really. You think: you'll be okay. You think: you have a lot to be grateful for. You think: you'll live.

(Or maybe you don't.)

-  
End.


End file.
